Archives for June 2011

Maybe it was because I was nursing a hangover but this morning’s breakfast seminar at the RSA just made my head hurt. From Big Society to Social Productivity coincided with the creation of the 2020 Public Services Hub and the publication of their launch paper. One of the speakers, Cllr Steve Reed, is Leader of Lambeth, the country’s first Cooperative Council. (Steve spoke about this at my debate on the Big Society last year). Reed wants to see ‘citizen-led’ public services that put people ‘in charge of their own destinies’. Instead of continuing to send in so-called experts to tackle the problem of gang violence he is ‘handing the resources of the state to the community’. Those living on the brutalised estates of Brixton, he argues, are best placed to solve the problem.

Unfortunately – because I liked much of what he had to say – Reed went on to contradict himself. He explained that the middle classes ‘have the capacity to participate if they choose to’. Does that mean that the rest of us lack the ability to take part in society (Big or otherwise)? That we’re just not up to doing things for ourselves because we need prompting and ‘supporting’. Certainly for Reed and therefore for Lambeth, the plan for the ‘very excluded’ is to ‘put capacity into them’. They will do this, he explained, by training up a ‘new cadre of facilitators’ for instance. After all, as Ben Lucas, founding Director of the 2020 Public Services Trust, explained, it would be Utopian to imagine the Big Society just ‘springing up’. Tell that to the participants in the Arab Spring. Or maybe they just had better community organisers.

As I explain here, I have a good deal of sympathy for co-production and some of the related ideas for improving public services that were discussed this morning. I am all for creating participative networks and challenging the traditional service delivery model that, as Reed rightly put it, is always ‘doing things to you’. The trouble is that efforts to involve local residents and users of public services can end up doing the same thing. It seems to me that we’re in danger of replacing the old model with something that is even more patronising and paternalistic. It is hard to escape the impression that we are very much being done to by advocates of the Big Society and Social Productivity. We are being participated whether we like it or not.

That’s what Toby Young – founder (among many other things) of the West London Free School – has called for. So said Claire Fox, director of Institute of Ideas, and chair of last night’s Voices of Freedom debate on ‘Freedom, Education and the State’. All the panelists – including Young, Tom Clougherty (Adam Smith Institute), David Davis MP, Matt Grist (Demos) and Professor Terence Kealey (vice-chancellor, University of Buckingham) – agreed that ‘excellence for some’ was preferable to ‘mediocrity for all’. This, the strapline for the debate, was more than a little leading but it did bring us quickly to the degradation not only of education today, but of the debate about education too.

Young was scathing on the previous government’s defence of ‘parity of attainment’ above all else. Defenders of the status quo, he said, complain not that free schools will fail but rather the opposite. They might succeed and prove to be good schools, and consequently show up the failings of their neighbouring state schools. Grist was also critical of the ‘misplaced egalitarianism’ that has passed for education policy for so long. Arguably, for all the ‘free, open, diverse’ schools that Clougherty and the government champion, the coalition’s social mobility strategy (as I explain here) is similarly misplaced. Still, the man from Demos, argued for a more ‘expansive’ notion of education, one that encourages something that appeals to all that is ‘aspiring, flourishing’ in our young people. Kealey rather split the panel with his defence of the Ivy League, but his grounds for doing so – the pursuit of excellence and their removal from the patronage of both state and ‘industry’ – were, again, sound.

Indeed, I found little to object to from any of the panelists. Except. I suppose it was Davis’s argument, on the one hand, that social mobility came to an end with the demise of the grammar school. And on the other, that Young’s free school experiment is the way to go. His co-panelists had all argued in their varying ways that its the ‘model’ or the ‘system’ that counts. Its who owns the school or university, how much independence it has, that determines what happens within. But this is a distraction. I suggested it might be better to focus on the ethos of our schools and what a ‘good education’ might look like. While a good case can be made for freeing up the school system – and the more free schools there are the better as far as I am concerned – this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what’s gone wrong with education. Less still how we are going to address it.

Frank Field, a working class Tory if ever there was one, is reported as saying it is ‘difficult to overestimate how significant today’s speech is.’ In reality Ed Miliband’s lecture on social responsibility this afternoon was as unremarkable as one might have expected.

He said his party will ‘listen’ to the people. Oh dear, not again. It was the New Labour government of which he was a part (lest we forget) that started this whole participatory, localising, ’empowering’ rhetoric. How much longer do we have to listen to this mantra? How about, Mr Miliband, actually having something to say. Something that might save us from the monster that the Big Society is becoming.

With Cameron’s compassionate/cutting Tories running the show (more or less) there is no let up from this meaningless drivel. I almost wish for the return of the ‘no such thing as society’ Tories. At least they stirred things up a bit. Far from making the case for social responsibility Miliband only confirms once more that the political class like nothing more than to delegate their responsibility to govern, to come up with policy ideas, etc etc.

The very notion of taking responsibility assumes that people are capable of autonomously doing as they will. That they don’t need nudging in this and that direction away from benefits and anti-social behaviour, or towards jobs and the good/Big Society. There is little between their … well, we can hardly call them visions can we? Except, claims Miliband, New-New Labour aren’t like the stick-wielding Tories, they’ll just dangle carrots in front of us irresponsible plebs. Oh, thanks.

We were asked at the YouGovStone debate last night ‘Do we need the Big Society?’ For Shaun Bailey, apparently now calling himself Ambassador for the Big Society, the answer could only be yes. He did, however, argue that the government lacks direction. He’s right but the Big Society isn’t helping. More important, the political class and their ‘civil society’ sector friends lack a basic faith in people. Whatever Big Society-types might claim, when it comes to it we’re not to be trusted. We need supporting and enabling, we need community organisers and ‘civic’ servants to show us how to do it. Even Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome and John Bird of Big Issue, for all their anti-state bluster, wanted to ‘rebuild’ government the better to run the Big Society.

Former BBC newsreader Martyn Lewis, in the chair, pointed to the Marlboro Man with his hand up. He was referring to my admittedly shocking choice of shirt rather than my attitude to smoking (which you can read about here). But he did get me thinking afterwards. Perhaps what we really need is to make a reality of the rugged individualism personified by the Marlboro Man in those old ads. If we can somehow rediscover that Marlboro spirit maybe society – big or otherwise – can look after itself. We certainly can’t go on as we are. Like the officious ‘community building’ initiatives favoured by New Labour before it, the Big Society will only further undermine the informal enterprising of community life, and dent people’s confidence in their their ability to run their own lives. The Big Society has, as the Archbishop of Canterbury says today, ‘fast become painfully stale’. And yet Cameron, for all his u-turning on the NHS and prisons, is holding on tightly to his so-called big idea. For the rest of us, the sooner we’re rid of it the better.

I always know something isn’t right when I find myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens. He was speaking as the sole contrarian on the panel at the launch of a pamphlet Civil Liberties: Up In Smoke. This was the first in a series of debates Voices of Freedom organised by The Free Society at the Institute of Economic Affairs. While I am as opposed to the smoking ban as Hitchens is opposed to people smoking (and much else besides), I couldn’t help agree that the anti-ban lobby tend toward ‘self-dramatisation’. They seem to think, he argued, that they are making a ‘bold stand against something or other’. But smoking is not a ‘moral choice’ or a matter for ‘profound conviction’.

While writer Sir Ronald Harwood was admirable in his unashamed defence of his lifestyle choice – ‘I love smoking’ he said, ‘I enjoy every puff I’ve ever taken’ – his co-speakers worried me. They too readily identified themselves with a persecuted minority. Simon Davies of Privacy International, and author of said pamphlet, spoke of the ‘victimisation’ and ‘discrimination’ that smokers face. Chris Snowdon, author of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, complained that they should be protected but instead it is ‘government instigating the bullying’. Thankfully, Daniel Hamilton of Big Brother Watch, perhaps conscious of the dangers of infantilising smokers, argued that ‘adults have a right to act as they wish’. They should resist efforts to ‘drive smoking off the face of the earth’.

Indeed they should. But they’ll first need to get to grips with the fact that arguments about personal liberty are being turned on their heads. Today, it is not freedom’s defenders, but those who oppose people living their lives as they choose, who wield the harm principle. J S Mill’s notion that the only brake on one’s liberty should be the harm done to somebody else no longer does the job. In our anxious times where anything and everything is deemed a risk, and we are all potentially vulnerable, harm – we are told – is all around us. Instead of challenging this view or simply defending their right to do as they please, anti-ban campaigners are entering into a dangerous game of competitive victimhood that they simply can’t win.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.